The children treated at Beirut’s St. George’s Hospital built an extended family together, painting and dancing together when they had the energy and rubbing each other’s backs as they braced for chemo sessions.
Now, these cancer-stricken children are struggling to maintain their treatment, and maintain the bonds they developed with each other over sometimes years of treatment, after a powerful explosion last week by Beirut ripe and took them to hospital – her home away from home – with it.
The blast destroyed four hospitals in Beirut, including St. George’s, one of the largest in the country, leaving many dozens of Lebanon’s youngest cancer patients unable to care.
Adding to her trauma were many children at St. George when the explosion struck, causing widespread injuries and killing at least one of her parents.
For Peter Noun, head of the Department of Pediatric Hematology and Oncology, only one of the three hospitals in which he practices is now operational.
“It is difficult to know that we have a deadly but treatable disease and we can do nothing for these children because everything is being destroyed,” said Drs. Noun.
Children respond well to chemotherapy, he explained, as long as they follow a strict schedule and do not miss sessions.
Since the explosion, the days of Dr. Now spent in Lebanon, checking on the sick children in their homes and visiting hospitals to see if they have room to admit his 110 patients who are in dire need of care.
But every hospital left in Beirut is over capacity, tending to the 6,000 Lebanese injured in the blast.
A further complication: Lebanon’s coronavirus numbers are growing, and Dr Noun worries the children he treats – already immunocompromised because of their chemotherapy – the virus could catch and die.
Dr. Noun was able to secure a handful of spots in one hospital outside Beirut for his most critical patients. He hopes that field hospitals built by foreign governments will be fast enough to take care of his remaining patients.
But time is running out, and he worries that some kids will return.
Marita Reaidy has lived most of her seven years in and out of St. George from the time she was born, a fragile premature baby.
When Marita received her second cancer diagnosis last year, she returned to St. George and began building her hospital family, choosing her favorite nurses, and choosing her friends from the other sick children.
“My house is now destroyed,” Marita said in an interview. ‘This was my hospital. It’s gone. I do not want my hospital to die like this. ”
All children interviewed for this article, and their parents, gave permission for their stories to be told and for their names to be published.
Marita and her mother, Amal Reaidy, woke up on Tuesday last week, excited that they would return home to see Marita’s father and sister after a week-long chemotherapy session.
The patient said goodbye to all the nurses and said goodbye to Yuri Abou Mrad, who had become one of her closest friends. Yuri, 7, was diagnosed with Ewing’s sarcoma last year.
St. George had become the only place where Yuri and Marita felt like normal children. No one gave her pitiful looks or stared at her bald heads.
Later that Tuesday night, Yuri’s father, Omar Abou Mrad, saw a fire raging at the harbor from a window near the hospital, sitting on a hill overlooking the Mediterranean Sea.
His son ran over to take a look, and whipped up the metal contraption that treated his chemotherapy.
The smoke turned black, and Yuri’s father began to worry about her. He knew from his childhood during Lebanon’s civil war that giant windows could be deadly, after an explosion shattered into deadly sharps.
Seconds later the explosion came, the shock wave rippling over Beirut, destroying buildings in its path. At St. George’s, windows were broken while parts of the ceiling collapsed on hospital beds, and patients pounded down.
When Mr. Abou Mrad arrived at the derby, Yuri cried and blew both, lying on top of shattered glass and twisted metal.
“It was waterfalls of blood,” Mr Abou Mrad said. ‘I was too scared to look down because I wasn’t sure if my body was still intact. I just looked at Yuri’s face and kept saying, ‘Don’t worry, everything will be fine.’ ”
An audio recording of the minutes after the explosion, taken by Mr Abou Mrad, captures the utter horror of the moment, the crying and crying.
“Yuri, do not be afraid, I am here with you,” Mr Abou Mrad said in the recording.
“But maybe it will explode again!” Yuri yelled.
Mr. Abou Mrad called for help, unable to move. The tubes that brought the chemotherapy into Yuri’s chest were wrapped around the pun.
Eventually, a nurse helped her free.
Despite a broken hand and a fractured rib, Mr Abou grabbed Mrad Yuri and placed him in a stairwell for emergency exit. He then joined forces with others to try to help the injured.
One father, whose daughter had just been diagnosed with cancer, was so badly injured that he died days later.
“The trauma of having cancer so young and then to see your father, blood coming out of his head, blood everywhere,” said Dr. Noun. “All she can say now is, ‘Baby will see me from above now, he will help me out of heaven.'”
The parents who survived the explosion are now exhausted. Life was rather difficult. Now it’s hell, they say.
In the months before the blast – the result, according to Lebanese officials, of 2,750 tons of ammonium nitrate caught fire near the port of Beirut – the country was already on the verge of collapse.
An economic crisis had destroyed many of the middle-class families who go to St. George for affordable, quality care. When the currency of Lebanon lost its value, the families struggled to provide the medicine and treatment their children needed.
Mar Dr. Noun always found a way to help her, they said. Now there’s not much he can do.
The blast damaged a government warehouse that stored imported drugs. The medicine reception on St. George was also destroyed.
The parents are now left to ask: how can they save their children in a country that cannot save itself? In a country with which the ammonium nitrate has been stored in the port since 2014 despite repeated warnings to Lebanese officials about the dangers it posed?
Yuri’s father said the family was considering leaving Lebanon for good.
“If it’s too late for us, for my generation, I do not want it to be too late for my children,” said Mr Abou Mrad. “I do not want them to be 18 and 18 and only know this destruction and sorrow.”
Gobran Pierre Tawk, the father of another young patient from St. George, moved back to Beirut from Australia in 2017 so that his daughter, Amanda, 3, could be born in Lebanon. He opened a small business, and everything went well. But it all began to fall apart in October, when the economy went into a tailspin and protests over government corruption and incompetence swept the country.
Amanda was diagnosed with cancer in December, and she and her parents have since been in St. Louis. George wenne.
Like many other Lebanese, the blast caused Mr Tawk to decide to emigrate, threatening to deprive Lebanon of the people it needed to rebuild.
On Monday, Amanda’s Australian visa arrived, accelerated by the country’s embassy after the attack.
“I believe in Lebanon, but I am also a father,” Mr Tawk said. ‘My priority is to make sure Amanda is safe and happy. You have someone who is dying of cancer and it is their right to get treatment.
“I love my country,” Mr. Tawk added. “But I would not have to worry about my children living or dying here.”
